Learning and Teaching (LATISS)

Studies often highlight how standardisation and consent are manufactured through the European Bologna Process (Brøgger 2019; Gibbs et al. 2014; Lawn and Grek 2012). This article shows how students’ conduct is still governed by multiple logics and dilemmas. The context for the article is the Bologna Process and the way it has been applied by the Danish government in the 2014 reforms that sought to fast-track the completion of student degrees. It analyses the impact of changes on students’ conduct through a series of focus group interviews with students who were confronted with the new demands to speed up their progress through their degrees. To illustrate the complexity of this standardisation, the analyses are framed within theoretical ideas of ‘risk’ (Beck 2006) and ‘translation’ (Latour and Callon 1986).

This article explores how three doctoral candidates enrolled in the discipline of Higher Education gained an understanding of social justice, equity-mindedness and diversity in the academy. Prior to the admission of these three students, two faculty members had reformed the doctoral programme to align it with the principles of inclusive pedagogy. They created a conceptual framework for the redesign of the programme's mission, curriculum and pedagogy. Echoing an article that those faculty members wrote about the programme, the authors use a collaborative autoethnographic approach to share their experiences of the programme. Just as the faculty members engaged in a fictitious dialogue with their source of inspiration, bell hooks, the authors engage in a conversation with the programme chair about their pursuit of education as the practice of freedom.

This article discusses how the teaching of qualitative research in higher education is threatened by the effects of new public management, by academic culture wars and by a growing belief in big data. The controversy over Alice Goffman's book On the Run presents one recent example of this. In an effort to counterbalance these developments, this article stresses the importance in social science curricula of ‘naturalistic inquiry’ – the artisanal core of qualitative research. Explicitly acknowledging emic viewpoints, naturalistic inquiry upholds the emancipatory ideal of making society transparent to its members. Teaching naturalistic inquiry as a craft may be the best way to assure ‘qualitative literacy’ among graduates in their various careers as socially responsible professionals.

Socrative is an online platform that allows a teacher to put questions to students through an app on their smart phone or tablet. In existence since 2011, its use is now quite common in university teaching. But is Socrative any good? This article reviews the literature on the device and discusses my research on the use of the app, the first carried out with social science students. The secondary research findings are that students find Socrative easy to use, fun, of genuine benefit to their learning and a medium that aids active participation. Furthermore, there is evidence that it benefits attainment as testing helps memory retention. My research findings broadly concur. Also considered is how Socrative use can be extended beyond revision-style testing to introduce students to new information that challenges existing beliefs and to elicit controversial opinions and sensitive information.

Global health programmes have become quite popular within universities in the United States. But despite the growth in undergraduate programming in global health, the training of American undergraduates to ensure they engage ethically when conducting research in a low- or middle-income country has not followed. I teach a course in global bioethics and developed the board game described in this article as a means of engaging students in active, peer-to-peer learning about ethical challenges, questions and concerns during the research planning process, while students are working abroad in unfamiliar contexts or upon return to their home university once their data collection is completed. The game is intended for students to apply what they learned regarding global bioethical practice.